Music Streaming Statistics 2024

For many of us, some of our most prized possessions in years gone by may have been CDs, cassettes or even vinyl versions of our favourite music. But gone are the days where you need a whole load of storage and a ton of physical CDs or cassettes to listen to your go to tunes.

Courtesy of streaming services, we’ve all got access to millions of tracks right in the palm of our hands.

But just how prevalent is music streaming, which are the most popular services and is it really killing the CD? We carried out a survey, dug into some data and crunched the numbers to bring you our global music streaming statistics for 2024.

Let’s dive in.

The Radio Edit - Key Music Streaming Facts

Just here for the short version? Here are the most important music streaming statistics you need for 2024. You’ll find more detail within:

• 38.1% of people in the UK use Spotify to listen to music
• 36.25% use Amazon music
• 30% of people in the UK still listen to CDs - but this figure falls drastically to just 7.56% amongst those aged 16 to 24
• Almost 1 in 12 people in the UK say they do not listen to music at all
• 16 to 24 year olds are likelier to listen to music on vinyl than they are on CD

Music Streaming Services Usage by Numbers

Music streaming services have millions and millions of users globally.

In January 2024, we commissioned a survey of 2,000 people aged 16 or over in the UK to find out which methods and services they use to listen to music.

Here’s what we asked:

• Which methods, if any, do you use to listen to music? (Check all that apply)
  • Spotify
  • Youtube Music
  • CDs
  • Amazon Music
  • Apple Music
  • Vinyl
  • Other (Please specify)
  • None - I don’t listen to music

Here’s what they told us

In other words, 38.1% of the UK population uses Spotify according to these statistics. It’s closely followed by Youtube Music (36.25%). Amazon Music isn’t too far behind (25.4%) and Apple Music follows with 14.75% penetration in the UK according to our data.

What did surprise us is the fact that the third most popular way in which people listen to music in 2024 is still CDs, with 30% of respondents claiming to to still use them.

It means CDs still outrank Amazon Music by a little way and Apple Music considerably.

Spotify vs Amazon Music 

Our statistics show that Spotify is the bigger platform of the two. By quite a way. While a quarter of Brits use Amazon Music, almost 40% use Spotify.

Spotify vs Youtube Music

Rather than Amazon music, it is Youtube that is proving to be the closest competitor for Spotify. Youtube music is used by just over 36% of people in the UK according to our statistics, putting it just behind the streaming giant that is Spotify.

However, there’s a big caveat here. These numbers are astronomically variable depending on the age of our respondents.

Young People and Music Streaming - The Statistics

30% of the population still listen to CDs. That’s a statistic that still took us by surprise. But if we delve into demographics a little, we can get a better understanding.

Over a third of the population in the UK is over the age of 55. So this demographic can influence averages quite notably. When we started to segment the data and look at music listening habits by age, a clear story emerged.

We can see:

• More than half of under 35s use Spotify
• Those aged 16 to 24 are slightly likelier to listen to music on vinyl than they are on CDs
• Spotify, on the whole, is the most popular music streaming platform in the UK. But this is not the case across all age groups For those aged 35 to 33, Youtube music is slightly more popular and for those aged 55 and over, it is notably more popular.

Spotify vs the CD

So is Spotify killing the CD?

Well, the age specific statistics certainly show a negative correlation between proportion of people who use Spotify and those who listen to music using CDs.

• Just 7.56% of those aged 16 to 24 use CDs
• At the other end of the spectrum, those aged 55 and over are more than 6 times as likely to listen to music on CDs with 47.2% citing this as a medium through which they listen to music

In fact, as we progress through age groups, two things happen:

• Older members of the population are more likely to listen to CDs
• They are also less likely to be Spotify users

Spotify usage again is different in different age groups.

• Less than a quarter (23.54%) of those aged 55 and over use Spotify
• The majority of people under 35 do use Spotify (57.33% of those aged 16 to 24 and 53.06% of 25 to 34s)

So is music streaming killing the CD? Well, yes. But the decline of this medium began before music streaming and began with the ability to buy MP3 files. As MP3 sales rose, CD sales declined. After all, the lure of having so many songs in your pocket as opposed to boxes of CDs in the garage of CDs stacked on shelves is quite something.

Some People Don’t Listen to Music AT ALL!

Ok, we appreciate that this isn’t directly related to music streaming statistics. But we were also quite taken aback with how many people say they do not listen to music at all.

Across the population, almost 1 in 12 (7.3%) people do not listen to music at all!

Once again, we find significant age differences here.

• Just 4% of the youngest adults in the UK (those aged 16 to 24%) say they don’t listen to music
• This rises to more than 1 in 10 (11.57%) of those aged 55 and over

Gender and Music Listening Habits

So we can see clear patterns amongst age groups. And from the data, it would be a reasonably fair assumption to say that the younger someone is, the likelier they are to listen to music exclusively on digital platforms and music streaming services than on physical media such as CDs.

But does gender affect how we use music streaming services?

We took a look at the statistics from our survey and split the numbers based on the gender of respondents.

This is what we found.

• Women are noticeably likelier to say they do not listen to music at all then men are
• Youtube music is more popular (slightly) with men than Spotify is, but Spotify has the lead amongst women
• Men are considerably likelier to use vinyl than women are

Music Streaming Platforms by Subscriber Numbers

Our UK survey data showed Spotify to be the most popular platform with music listeners. But is this reflected in official subscriber numbers?

Source: https://sxmbusiness.com/music-streaming-market-share-and-revenue-statistics/

*Tencent is a China only music streaming service

Spotify boasts considerably the largest volume of global subscribers.

Music Streaming Library Sizes

It’s a fair assumption that the size of the library is going to be a big deal for users deciding which music streaming service to subscribe to. And in a space that is increasingly saturated and competitive, making sure you’ve got the music your subscribers want is a big deal.

So, is one of the reasons that Spotify has so many more subscribers than other platforms down to library size?

Well, maybe. According to the statistics, the library sizes of the big music streaming platforms as of 2022 were as follows:

*The version of Amazon Music that is free to Amazon Prime users has 2 million songs (this is the version that the majority of subscribers use) while Amazon states that its Music Unlimited subscription has a library of 90 million songs.

Most Popular Music Streaming Service by Searches

One way to get a view on how many people are interested in something is by checking out the number of times people search for it on Google. We all head to Google to nosey in on celebrities, get inspiration for travel, find out what our health symptoms might mean (we’d advise against that one!) and find products and services.

So we used kwfinder.com to find out how many times in any given month a particular streaming service is searched for in Google.

We then added the volumes for each month together to give us annual totals:

(Note that the y axis is on a log scale to better show all brands on one graph)

By far and away, Spotify leads the race for searches with 422.2 million searches in Google globally in 2022 for “spotify.” The second place contender was Amazon Music with 231.5 million.

Music Streaming on Social in 2024

We don’t just stream a lot. We talk about what we’re streaming on social media.

As of February 2024, there are 27.5 million posts in Instagram with the hashtag #spotify and a further 2.3 million with the hashtag #spotifyplaylist. They’re not the only ones either:

The Most Streamed Christmas Songs of all Time on Spotify

Every Christmas we listen to songs that are (in some cases) decades old. Christmas songs are timeless and despite the fact they’re only really streamed for a month of the year, some of them have racked up immense streaming statistics.

We took a look (as of November 27th 2023) at the most streamed Christmas songs of all time. For our list of songs, we used this Timeout roundup and had a look at stream numbers. Here’s what we found: